Category Archives: EMC

When I attended Network Field Day 3 (NFD3) in the Bay Area back in late March, the other delegates and I had the pleasure of receiving a presentation on Infineta Systems’ Data Mobility Switch (DMS), a WAN-optimization system built with merchant silicon and designed to serve as a high-performance data-center interconnect for applications such as multi-gigabit Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BCDR), cross-site virtualization, and other variations on what Infineta calls “Big Traffic,” a fast-moving sibling of Big Data.

Suffice it to say, Infineta got our attention with its market focus (data-center interconnect rather than branch acceleration) and its compelling technological approach to solving the problem. I thought Winkworth made an astute point in noting that Infineta’s targeting of data-center interconnect means that the performance and results of its DMS can be assessed purely on the basis of statistical results rather than on human perceptions of application responsiveness.

Name that Tune

Last week, Infineta’s Haseeb Budhani, the company’s chief product officer, gave me a update that coincided with the company’s announcement of FlowTune, a software QoS feature set for the DMS that is intended to deliver the performance guarantees required for applications such as high-speed replication and data backup.

Budhani used a medical analogy to explain why FlowTune is more effective than traditional solutions. FlowTune, he said, takes a preventive approach to network congestion occasioned by contentious application flows, treating the cause of the problem instead of responding to the symptoms. So, whereas conventional approaches rely on packet drops to facilitate congestion recovery, FlowTune dynamically manages application-transmission rates through a multi-flow mechanism that allocates bandwidth credits according to QoS priorities that specify minimum and maximum performance thresholds. As a result, Budhani says, the WAN is fully utilized.

First off, Dell now is positioned to offer its customers a full complement of converged infrastructure, spanning server, storage, and networking hardware, as well as management software. For customers seeking a single-vendor, one-throat-to-choke solution, this puts Dell on parity with IBM and HP, while Cisco still must partner with EMC or with NetApp for its storage technology.

Bringing the Storage

Until this announcement, Dell was lacking the storage ingredients. Now, with what Dell is calling the Dell Converged Blade Data Center solution, the company is adding its EqualLogic iSCSI Blade Arrays to Dell PowerEdge blade servers and Dell Force10 MXL blade switching. Dell says this package gives customers an entire data center within a single blade enclosure, streamlining operations and management, and thereby saving money.

An an aside, it’s worth mentioning that Dell’s inclusion of Brocade’s Fibre-Channel switches confirms that Dell is keeping that partnership alive to satisfy customers’ FC requirements.

Full Value from Acquisitions

In summary, then, is Dell delivering converged infrastructure with both its in-house storage options, demonstrating that it has fully integrated its major hardware acquisitions into the mix. It’s covering as much converged ground as it can with this announcement.

Nonetheless, it’s fair to ask where Dell will find customers for its converged offerings. During my briefing with Dell, I was told that mid-market was the real sweet spot, though Dell also sees departmental opportunities in large enterprises.

The mid-market, though, is a smart choice, not only because the various technology pieces, individually and collectively, seem well suited to the purpose, but also because Dell, given its roots and lineage, is a natural player in that space. Dell has a strong mandate to contest the mid-market, where it can hold its own against any of its larger converged-infrastructure rivals.

Mid-Market Sweet Spot

What’s more, the mid-market — unlike cloud-service providers today and some large enterprise in the not-too-distant future — are unlikely to have the inclination, resources, and skills to pursue a DIY, software-driven, DevOps-oriented variant of converged infrastructure that might involve bare-bones hardware from Asian ODMs. At the end of the day, converged infrastructure is sold as packaged hardware, and paying customers will need to perceive and realize value from buying the boxes.

The mid-market would seem more than receptive to the value proposition that Dell is selling, which is that its converged infrastructure will reduce the complexity of IT management and deliver operational cost savings.

This finally leads us to a discussion of Dell’s take on converged infrastructure. As noted in an eChannelLine article, Dell’s notion of converged infrastructure encompasses operations management, services management, and applications management. As Dell continues down the acquisition trail, we should expect the company to place greater emphasis on software-based intelligence in those areas.

That, too, would be a smart move. The battle never ends, but Dell — despite its struggles in the PC market — is now more than punching its own weight in converged infrastructure.

But let’s discuss Cisco and storage first, then consider the matter within a broader context.

Risks, Rewards, and Precedents

Obviously a move into storage would involve significant risks as well as potential rewards. Cisco would have to think carefully, as it presumably has done, about the likely consequences and implications of such a move. The stakes are high, and other parties — current competitors and partners alike — would not sit idly on their hands.

Then again, Cisco has been down this road before, when it chose to start selling servers rather than relying on boxes from partners, such as HP and Dell. Today, of course, Cisco partners with EMC and NetApp for storage gear. Citing the precedent of Cisco’s server incursion, one could make the case that Cisco might be tempted to call the same play .

After all, we’re entering a period of converged and virtualized infrastructure in the data center, where private and public clouds overlap and merge. In such a world, customers might wish to get well-integrated compute, networking, and storage infrastructure from a single vendor. That’s a premise already accepted at HP and Dell. Meanwhile, it seems increasingly likely data-center infrastructure is coming together, in one way or another, in service of application workloads.

Limits to Growth?

Cisco also has a growth problem. Despite attempts at strategic diversification, including failed ventures in consumer markets (Flip, anyone?), Cisco still hasn’t found a top-line driver that can help it expand the business while supporting its traditional margins. Cisco has pounded the table perennially for videoconferencing and telepresence, but it’s not clear that Cisco will see as much benefit from the proliferation of video collaboration as once was assumed.

To complicate matters, storm clouds are appearing on the horizon, with Cisco’s core businesses of switching and routing threatened by the interrelated developments of service-provider alienation and software-defined networking (SDN). Cisco’s revenues aren’t about to fall off a cliff by any means, but nor are they on the cusp of a second-wind surge.

Such uncertain prospects must concern Cisco’s board of directors, its CEO John Chambers, and its institutional investors.

Suspicious Minds

In storage, Cisco currently has marriages of mutual convenience with EMC (VBlocks and the sometimes-strained VCE joint venture) and with NetApp (the FlexPod reference architecture). The lyrics of Mark James’ song Suspicious Minds are evocative of what’s transpiring between Cisco and these storage vendors. The problem is not only that Cisco is bigamous, but that the networking giant might have another arrangement in mind that leaves both partners jilted.

Neither EMC nor NetApp is oblivious to the danger, and each has taken care to reduce its strategic reliance on Cisco. Conversely, Cisco would be exposed to substantial risks if it were to abandon its existing partnership in favor of a go-it-alone approach to storage.

I think that’s particularly true in the case of EMC, which is the majority owner of server-virtualization market leader VMware as well as a storage vendor. The corporate tandem of VMware and EMC carries considerable enterprise clout, and Cisco is likely to be understandably reluctant to see the duo become its adversaries.

Caught in a Trap

Still, Cisco has boxed itself into a strategic corner. It needs growth, it hasn’t been able to find it from diversification away from the data center, and it could easily see the potential of broadening its reach from networking and servers to storage. A few years ago, the logical choice might have been for Cisco to acquire EMC. Cisco had the market capitalization and the onshore cash to pull it off five years ago, perhaps even three years ago.

Since then, though, the companies’ market fortunes have diverged. EMC now has a market capitalization of about $54 billion, while Cisco’s is slightly more than $90 billion. Even if Cisco could find a way of repatriating its offshore cash hoard without taking a stiff hit from the U.S. taxman, it wouldn’t have the cash to pull of an acquisition of EMC, whose shareholders doubtless would be disinclined to accept Cisco stock as part of a proposed transaction.

Therefore, even if it wanted to do so, Cisco cannot acquire EMC. It might have been a good move at one time, but it isn’t practical now.

Losing Control

Even NetApp, with a market capitalization of more than $12.1 billion, would rate as the biggest purchase by far in Cisco’s storied history of acquisitions. Cisco could pull it off, but then it would have to try to further counter and commoditize VMware’s virtualization and cloud-management presence through a fervent embrace of something like OpenStack or a potential acquisition of Citrix. I don’t know whether Cisco is ready for either option.

Actually, I don’t see an easy exit from this dilemma for Cisco. It’s mired in somewhat beneficial but inherently limiting and mutually distrustful relationships with two major storage players. It would probably like to own storage just as it owns servers, so that it might offer a full-fledged converged infrastructure stack, but it has let the data-center grass grow under its feet. Just as it missed a beat and failed to harness virtualization and cloud as well as it might have done, it has stumbled similarly on storage.

The status quo is likely to prevail until something breaks. As we all know, however, making no decision effectively is a decision, and it carries consequences. Increasingly, and to an extent that is unprecedented, Cisco is losing control of its strategic destiny.

At Martin Casado’s Network Heresy blog yesterday, a guest post was offered by Andrew Lambeth, who once led the vDS distributed switching project at VMware but is now, like Casado, ensconced at Nicira. The post was titled provocatively, “Networking Doesn’t Need a VMWare.”

It was different in substance and tone from Casado’s posts, which typically are balanced, logical, and carefully constructed. I appreciate those qualities. Words matter, and Casado invariably takes the time to choose the right ones and to compose posts that communicate complicated ideas clearly. Even better, he does so without undue vendor bias.

Maybe he’s really a shrewd master of manipulation, but I always get the impression Casado is sincere, that he means what he says and says what he means. One actually learns something from reading his blog. That’s always refreshing, in this industry or any other.

Defining (or Redefining) Network Virtualization

As I said, the post from Lambeth was a departure in more ways than one. It was logical and carefully constructed, just like Casado’s writing, but it did not attempt to achieve any sort of balance. Instead, given the venue, it was strikingly partisan and tendentious.

Despite the technical window-dressing, it was devised to differentiate and distinguish Nicira’s approach to network virtualization from those of other players in the space, established vendors and startups alike. It also sought, implicitly if not explicitly, to derogate OpenFlow in the still-unfolding SDN hierarchy of value.

Just to summarize, though I encourage you to read the post yourself, Lambeth argues that, while there’s industry consensus on the desirability of network virtualization, there’s a significant difference of opinion on how it should be achieved. Network virtualization is not at all the same as server virtualization, he writes, citing the need in the former for “scale (lots of it) and distributed state consistency.” He concludes by saying that the current preoccupation with the data path, the realm of OpenFlow, is akin to “worrying about a trivial component of an otherwise enormously challenging problem.”

Positioning and Differentiation

Commenting on Lambeth’s post, Chris Hoff, formerly of Cisco and now with Juniper Networks (and a prolific tweeter, I might add), concluded correctly that it “smacks of positioning against both OpenFlow as well as other network virtualization startups.”

In issuing that positioning statement, Nicira not only is attempting to distance itself from the OpenFlow crowd; it also has at least a couple specific vendors in mind.

But Nicira is thinking about competitors other than Big Switch, too. Readers of this blog will know that of one of my recurring themes — some would call it a conspiracy theory — is that the VCE partnership between Cisco and EMC is subject to increasing strain and tension. In short, EMC acquired VMware, Cisco didn’t, and now virtualization — and maybe VWware — is becoming integral to the future of networking.

Nicira’s Lambeth, formerly involved with distributed switching at VMware, and his counterparts at Big Switch agree that network virtualization is important. Where they disagree, perhaps, is in how it should be achieved.

Meanwhile, both vendors at one time or another, as Lambeth concedes at the outset of his post, have espoused variations on the claim that “networking needs a VMware.” Apparently, the team at Nicira has reconsidered that premise and is going in a different direction.

It might have adjusted course for reasons other than (or in addition to) those relating to architecture and technological requirements.

Herrod has predicted that “software-defined networking will become a mainstay of data- center architectures” in 2012. It’s safe to assume that he foresees his company playing a major part in making his prognostication a reality.

While Zamarian has talked about adding Layer 4-7 network services, presumably through acquisition, what about the bigger picture? We’ve pondered that question, and some have asked it, including one gentleman who posed the query on the blog of Brad Hedlund, another former Ciscoite now at Dell.

Data Center’s Big Picture

The question surfaced in a string of comments that followed Hedlund’s perceptive analysis of Embrane’s recent Heleos unveiling. Specifically, the commenter asked Hedlund to elucidate Dell’s strategic vision in data-center networking. He wanted Hedlund to provide an exposition on how Dell intended to differentiate itself from the likes of Cisco’s UCS/Nexus, Juniper’s QFabric, and Brocade’s VCS.

I quote Hedlund’s response:

“This may not be the answer you are looking for right now, but .. Consider for a moment that the examples you cite; Cisco UCS/Nexus; Juniper QFabric; Brocade VCS — all are either network only or network centric strategies. Think about that for a second. Take your network hat off for just a minute and consider the data center as a whole. Is the network at the center of the data center universe? Or is network the piece that facilitates the convergence of compute and storage? Is the physical data center network trending toward a feature/performance discussion, or price/performance?

Yes, Dell now has a Tier 1 data center network offering with Force10. And with Force10, Dell can (and will) win in network only conversations. Now consider for a moment what Dell represents as a whole .. a total IT solutions provider of Compute, Storage, Network, Services, and Software. And now consider Dell’s heritage ofproviding solutions that are open, capable, and affordable.”

Compare and Contrast

It’s a fair enough answer. By reframing the relevant context to encompass the data center in its entirety, rather than just the network infrastructure, Dell can offer an expansive value-based, one-stop narrative that its rivals — at least those cited by the questioner — cannot match on their own.

Let’s consider Cisco. For all its work with EMC/VMware and NetApp on Vblocks and FlexPods, respectively, Cisco does not provide its own storage technologies for converged infrastructure. Juniper and Brocade are pure networking vendors, dependent on partners for storage, compute, and complementary software and services.

IBM also warrants mention. Its home-grown networking portfolio is restricted to the range of products it obtained through its acquisition of Blade Network Technologies last year. Like HP, but to a greater degree, IBM resells and OEMs networking gear from other vendors, including Brocade and Juniper. It also OEMs some of its storage portfolio from NetApp, but it also has a growing stable of orchestration and management software, and it definitely has a prodigious services army.

Full-Course Fare

Caveats aside, Dell can tell a reasonably credible story about its ability to address the full range of data-center requirements. Dell’s success with that strategy will depend not only its sales execution, but also on its capacity to continually deliver high-quality solutions across the gamut of compute, storage, networking, software, and services. Offering a moderately tasty data-center repast won’t be good enough. If Dell wants customers to patronize it and return for more, it must deliver a savory menu spanning every course of the meal.

To his credit, Hedlund acknowledges that Dell must be “capable.” He also notes that Dell must be open and affordable. To be sure, Dell doesn’t have the data-center brand equity to extract the proprietary entitlements derived from vendor lock-in, certainly not in the networking sphere, where even Cisco is finding that game to be harder work these days.

Dell, HP, and IBM each might be able to craft a single-vendor narrative that spans the entire data center, but the cogency of those pitches are only as credible as the solutions the vendors deliver. For many customers, a multivendor infrastructure, especially in a truly interoperable standards-based world, might be preferable to a soup-to-nuts solution from a single vendor. That’s particularly true if the single-vendor alternative has glaring deficiencies and weaknesses, or if it comes with perpetual proprietary overhead and constraints.

Still Early

I think the real differentiation isn’t so much in whether data-center solutions are delivered by a single vendor or by multiple vendors. I suspect the meaningful differentiation will be delivered in how those environments are further virtualized, automated, orchestrated, and managed as coherent unified entities.

Dell has bought itself a seat at the table where that high-stakes game will unfold. But it isn’t alone, and the big cards have yet to be played.

It has been nearly eight years since EMC acquired VMware. The acquisition announcement went over the newswires on December 15, 2003. EMC paid approximately $635 million for VMware, and Joe Tucci, EMC’s president and CEO, had this to say about the deal:

“Customers want help simplifying the management of their IT infrastructures. This is more than a storage challenge. Until now, server and storage virtualization have existed as disparate entities. Today, EMC is accelerating the convergence of these two worlds .“

“We’ve been working with the talented VMware team for some time now, and we understand why they are considered one of the hottest technology companies anywhere. With the resources and commitment of EMC behind VMware’s leading server virtualization technologies and the partnerships that help bring these technologies to market, we look forward to a prosperous future together.”

Virtualization Goldmine

Oh, the future was prosperous . . . and then some. It’s a deal that worked out hugely in EMC’s favor. Even though the storage behemoth has spun out VMware in the interim, allowing it to go public, EMC still retains more than 80 percent ownership of its virtualization goldmine.

Consider that EMC paid just $635 million in 2003 to buy the server-virtualization market leader. VMware’s current market capitalization is more than $38 billion. That means EMC’s stake in VMware is worth more than $30 billion, not including the gains it reaped when it took VMware public. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to suggest that EMC’s purchase of VMware will be remembered as Tucci’s defining moment as EMC chieftain.

Now, let’s consider another vendor that had an opportunity to acquire VMware back in 2003.

Massive Market Cap, Industry Dominance

A few years earlier, at the pinnacle of the dot-com boom in March 2000, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world, sporting a market capitalization of more than US$500 billion. It was a networking colossus that bestrode the globe, dominating its realm of the industry as much as any other technology company during any other period. (Its only peers in that regard were IBM in the mainframe era and Microsoft and Intel in the client-server epoch.)

Although Juniper Networks brought its first router to market in the fall of 1998 and began to challenge Cisco for routing patronage at many carriers early in the first decade of the new millennium, Cisco remained relatively unscathed in enterprise networking, where its Catalyst switches grew into a multibillion-dollar franchise after it saw off competitive challenges in the late 90s from companies such as 3Com, Cabletron, Nortel, and others.

As was its wont since its first acquisition, involving Crescendo Communications in 1993, Cisco remained an active buyer of technology companies. It bought companies to inorganically fortify its technological innovation, and to preclude competitors from gaining footholds among its expanding installed base of customers.

Non-Buyer’s Remorse?

It’s true that the post-boom dot-com bust cooled Cisco’s acquisitive ardor. Nonetheless, the networking giant made nine acquisitions from May 2002 through to the end of 2003. The companies Cisco acquired in that span included Hammerhead Networks, Navarro Networks, AYR Networks, Andiamo Systems, Psionic Software, Okena, SignalWorks, Linksys, and Latitude Communications.

The biggest acquisition in that period involved spin-in play Andiamo Systems, which provided the technological foundation for Cisco’s subsequent push to dominate storage networking. Cisco was at risk of paying as much as $2.5 billion for Andiamo, but the actual price tag for that convoluted spin-in transaction was closer to $750 million by the time it finally closed in 2004. The next-biggest Cisco acquisition during that period involved home-networking vendor Linksys, for which Cisco paid about $500 million.

Cisco announced the acquisitions of Hammerhead Networks and Navarro Networks in a single press release. Hammerhead, for which Cisco exchanged common stock valued at up to $173 million, developed software that accelerated the delivery of IP-based billing, security, and QoS; the company was folded into the Cable Business Unit in Cisco’s Network Edge and Aggregation Routing Group. Navarro Networks, for which Cisco exchanged common stock valued at up to $85 million, designed ASIC components for Ethernet switching.

Although the facts probably are familiar to many readers, Cisco’s acquisition of Andiamo was noteworthy for several reasons. It was a spin-in acquisition, in which Cisco funded the company to go off and develop technology on its own, only later to be brought back in-house through acquisition. Andiamo was led by its CEO Buck Gee, and it included a core group of engineers who also were at Cresendo Communications. The concept and execution of the spin-in move at Cisco was highly controversial within the company, seen as operationally and strategically innovative by many senior executives even though others claimed it engendered envy, invidious, and resentment among rank-and-file employees.

No matter, Andiamo was meant to provide market leadership for Cisco in the IP-based storage networking and to give Cisco a means of battering Brocade in Fibre Channel. That plan hasn’t come to fruition, with Brocade still leading in a tenacious Fibre Channel market and Cisco banking on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to go from the edge to the core. (The future of storage networking, including the often entertaining Fiber Channel-versus-FCoE debates, are another matter, and not within the purview of this post.)

While we’re on the topic of Andiamo, its former engineers continue to make news. Just this week, former Andiamo engineers Dante Malagrinò and Marco Di Benedetto officially launched Embrane, a company that is committed to delivering a platform for virtualized L4-7 network services at large cloud service providers. Those two gentlemen also were involved in Cisco last big spin-in move, Nuova Systems, which provided the foundation for Cisco’s Unified Computing Systems (UCS).

As for Cisco’s post-Andiamo acquisition announcements in 2002, Okena and Psionic both were involved in intrusion-detection technology. Of the two, Okena represented the larger transaction, valued at about $154 million in stock.

Interestingly, not much is available publicly these days regarding Cisco’s announced acquisition of SignalWorks in March of 2003. If you visit the CrunchBase profile for SignalWorks and click on a link that is supposed to take you to a Cisco press release announcing the deal, you’ll get a “Not Found” message. A search of the Cisco website turns up two press releases — relating to financial results in Cisco’s third and fourth quarters of fiscal year 2003, respectively — that obliquely mention the SignalWorks acquisition. The purchase price of the IP-audio company was about $16 million. CNet also covered the acquisition when it first came to light.

Other Strategic Priorities

Cisco’s last announced acquisitions in that timeframe involved home-networking player Linksys, part of Cisco’s ultimately underachieving bid to become a major player in the consumer space, and web-conferencing vendor Latitude Communications.

And now we get the crux of this post. Cisco announced a number of acquisitions in 2002 and 2003, but it was one they didn’t make that reverberates to this day. It was a watershed acquisition, a strategic masterstroke, but it was made by EMC, not by Cisco. As I said, the implications resound through to this day and probably will continue to ramify for years to come.

Some might contend that Cisco perhaps didn’t grasp the long-term significance of virtualization. Apparently, though, some at Cisco were clamoring for the company to buy VMware. The missed opportunity wasn’t attributable to Cisco failing to see the importance of virtualization — some at Cisco had the prescience to see where the technology would lead — but because an acquisition of VMware wasn’t considered as high a priority as the spin-in of Andiamo for storage networking and the acquisition of Linksys for home networking.

Cisco placed its bets elsewhere, perhaps thinking that it had more time to develop a coherent and comprehensive strategy for virtualization. Then EMC made its move.

Missed the Big Chance

To this day, in my view, Cisco is paying an exorbitant opportunity cost for failing to take VMware off the market, leaving it for EMC and ultimately allowing the storage leader, yeas later, to gain the upper hand in the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company joint venture that delivers UCS-encompassing VBlocks. There’s a rich irony there, too, when one considers that Cisco’s UCS contribution to the VBlock package is represented by technology derived from spin-in Nuova.

But forget about VCE and VBlocks. What about the bigger picture? Although Cisco likes to talk itself up as a leader in virtualization, it’s not nearly as prominent or dominant as it might have been. Is there anybody who would argue that Cisco, if it had acquired and then integrated and assimilated VMware as half as well as it digested Crescendo, wouldn’t have absolutely thrashed all comers in converged data-center infrastructure and cloud infrastructure?

Although EMC’s ownership stake in VMware amounts to about 80 percent (or perhaps even just north of that amount), its has 98 percent of the voting shares in the company, which effectively means EMC steers the ship, regardless of public pronouncements VMware executives might issue regarding their firm being an autonomous corporate entity.

Keeping Cisco Interested but Contained

Conversely, Cisco owns approximately five percent of VMware’s Class A shares, but none of its Class B shares, and it held just one percent of voting power as of March 2011. As of that same date, EMC owned all of VMware’s 330,000,000 Class B Shares and 33,066,050 of its 118,462,369 shares of Class A common shares. Cisco has a stake in VMware, but it’s a small one and it has it at the pleasure of EMC, whose objective is to keep Cisco sufficiently interested so as not to pursue other strategic options in data-center virtualization and cloud infrastructure.

The EMC gambit has worked, up to the point. But Cisco, which missed its big chance in 2003, has been trying ever since then to reassert its authority. Nuova, and all that flowed from it, was Cisco’s first attempt to regain lost ground, and now it is partnering, to varying degrees, with VMware and EMC competitors such as NetApp, Citrix, and Microsoft. It also has gotten involved involved with OpenStack and the oVirt Project in a bid to hedge its virtualization bets.

Yes, some of those moves are indicative of coopetition, and Cisco retains its occasionally strained VCE joint venture with EMC and VMware, but Cisco clearly is playing for time, looking for a way to redefine the rules of the game.

What Cisco is trying to do is break an impasse of its own making, a result of strategic choices it made nearly a decade ago.

The networking industry’s version of Groundhog Day resurfaced late last week when the Wall Street Journal published an article in which “people familiar with the matter” indicated that Brocade Communications Systems was up for sale — again.

Just like last time, investment-banking firm Qatalyst Partners, headed by the indefatigable Frank Quattrone, appears to have been retained as Brocade’s agent. Quattrone and company failed to find a buyer for Brocade last time, and many suspect the same fate will befall the principals this time around.

Changed Circumstances

A few things, however, are different from the last time Brocade was put on the block and Qatalyst beat Silicon Valley’s bushes seeking prospective buyers. For one thing, Brocade is worth less now than it was back then. The company’s shares are worth roughly half as much as they were worth during fevered speculation about its possible acquisition back in the early fall of 2009. With a current market capitalization of about $2.15 billion, Brocade would be easier for a buyer to digest these days.

That said, the business case for Brocade acquisition doesn’t seem as compelling now as it was then. The core of its commercial existence, still its Fibre Channel product portfolio, is well on its way to becoming a slow-growth legacy business. What’s worse, it has not become a major player in Ethernet switching subsequent to its $3 billion purchase of Foundry Networks in 2008. Running the numbers, prospective buyers would be disinclined to pay much of a premium for Brocade today unless they held considerable faith in the company’s cloud-networking vision and strategy, which isn’t at all bad but isn’t assured to succeed.

Unfortunately, another change is that fewer prospective buyers would seem to be in the market for Brocade these days. Back in 2009, Dell, HP, Oracle, IBM all were mentioned as possible acquirers of the company. One would be hard pressed to devise a plausible argument for any of those vendors to make a play for Brocade now.

Dell is busily and happily assimilating and integrating Force10 Networks; HP is still trying to get its networking house in order and doesn’t need the headaches and overlaps an acquisition of Brocade would entail; IBM is content to stand pat for now with its BLADE Network Technologies acquisition; and, as for Oracle, Larry Ellison was adamant that he wanted no part of Brocade. Admittedly, Ellison is known for his shrewdness and occasional reverses, but he sured seemed convincing regarding Oracle’s position on Brocade.

Sorting Out the Remaining Candidates

So, that leaves, well, who exactly? Some believe Cisco might buy up Brocade as a consolidation play, but that seems only a remote possibility. Others see Juniper Networks similarly making a consolidation play for Brocade. It could happen, I suppose, but I don’t think Juniper needs a distraction of that scale just as it is reaching several strategic crossroads (delivery of product roadmap, changing industry dynamics, technological shifts in its telco and service-provider markets). No, that just wouldn’t seem a prudent move, with the risks significantly outweighing the potential rewards.

Some say that private-equity players, some still flush with copious cash in their coffers, might buy Brocade. They have the means and the opportunity, but is the motive sufficient? It all comes back to believing that Brocade is on a strategic path that will make it more valuable in the future than it is today. In that regard, the company’s recent past performance, from a valuation standpoint, is not encouraging.

A far-out possibility, one that I would classify as remotely unlikely, envisions EMC buying Brocade. That would signal an abrupt end to the Cisco-EMC partnership, and I don’t see a divorce, were it to transpire, occurring quite so suddenly or irrevocably.

I do, however, see one dark-horse vendor that could make a play for Brocade, and might already have done so.

The question is, does Hitachi want them? Today, as indicated on the Hitachi website, the company partners with Brocade, Cisco, Emulex (adapters), and QLogic (adapters) for Fibre Channel networking and with Brocade and QLogic (adapters) for iSCSI networking.

The last time Brocade was said to the market, the anticlimactic outcome left figurative egg on the faces of Brocade directors and on those of the investment bankers at Qatalyst, which has achieved a relatively good batting average as a sales agent. Let’s assume — and, believe me, it’s a safe assumption — that media leaks about potential acquisitions typically are carefully contrived occurrences, done either to make a market or to expand a market in which there’s a single bidder that has declared intent and made an offer. In the latter case, the leak is made to solicit a competitive bid and drive up value.

Hold the Egg this Time

I’m not sure what transpired the first time Qatalyst was contracted to find a buyer for Brocade. The only sure inference is that the result (or lack thereof) was not part of the plan. Giving both parties the benefit of the doubt, one would think lessons were learned and they would not want to perform a reprise of the previous script. So, while perhaps last time there wasn’t a bidder or the bidder withdrew its offer after the media leak was made, I think there’s a prospective buyer firmly at the table this time. I also think Brocade wants to see whether a better offer can be had.

My educated guess, with the usual riders and qualifications in effect,* is that perhaps Hitachi or a private-equity concern (Silver Lake, maybe) is at the table. With the leak, Brocade and Qatalyst are playing for time and leverage.